Reporting on news articles such as this, it is difficult to keep the ‘Inner Editor’ (who has a homeschooling viewpoint) from blue-penciling it from top to bottom to point out what the Editor sees as conclusions originating from a school-viewpoint. It is hard to tell if the school-viewpoint in articles of this type comes from the people interviewed, or is only how the reporter put the article together.

I understand that articles such as these are written from a mainstream outlook, and that we can’t expect all the reporters in the world to have homeschooling as their point of reference in articles about local homeschooling. The institutional emphasis in these articles invisibly confirms the mainstream reader’s conception of (the unfortunately named) ‘homeschooling’ to be ‘organized schooling.’

Too bad we don’t have a time machine (and a great new name for raising kids in academic freedom — home autodidacticism? [too clunky] ) so someone could go back and seed those early news reports with a name other than ‘homeschooling.’